Abstract

The essay concerns the work of the film-maker Gerry Schum, who collaborated with a generation of avant-garde artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to establish a new artistic medium: the work of art made specifically for TV, and subsequently for video. His first compilation, Land Art, was broadcast over German television in 1969 and was subsequently included in the exhibition ‘When Attitudes become Form’, held at the ICA London. Identifications followed a year later. The argument of the essay is that Schum’s work helped to undermine two of the stabilising principles of late-modernist art: the distinction between ‘arts of space’ and ‘arts of time’, and the distinction between the autographic and the allographic. Despite his early death and the brevity of his career, Schum’s enterprise served both to demonstrate the yawning gap between works of art and televised coverage of art, and to show how it might be closed.